Cinema Revisited: 42nd Street is the quintessential backstage musical

42nd Street

Directed by Busby Berkeley. Cast: Warner Baxter, Bebe Daniels, George Brent, Ruby Keeler, Guy Kibbee, Una Merkel, Ginger Rogers, Ned Sparks, Dick Powell, Allen Jenkins, Edward J. Nugent, Robert McWade, George E. Stone. Released March 11, 1933. Running time: 89 minutes.

As pre-code cinema goes, a film like "42nd Street" with its financial backers, directors, actors, dancers, promises, failures, gangsters, romances, and other forms of backstage drama, offers a pretty searing portrait of musical theater. The usual grittiness of Warner Brothers' production methods is as predominant as can be found in any of their underworld dramas from the same period. The realism in this musical would disappear a few years later, as the genre was opened up, adding color and spectacle. By the time films like "Camelot" and "South Pacific" were being produced, "42nd Street" seemed archaic. Now, in the 21st century, those pretentious epics have dated more than this older, more intimate effort.

Warner Baxter plays Julian Marsh, an ailing Broadway producer who is putting together what he realizes will be the last show he'll produce in life. His chief financer is Abner Dillon (Guy Kibbee) who insists the show be built around Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels) because the two have an "arrangement." She is merely using him, though, and having a romance with handsome Pat Denning (George Brent). There are several vignettes contained therein, with young Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler) stumbling into a romance with juvenile Billy Lawler (Dick Powell) and having the opportunity to take the lead when Dorothy breaks her ankle. The film is further spiced up with various roles handled by such welcome veterans as Una Merkel and Ginger Rogers as a couple of seasoned and wizened dancers, George E. Stone as an assistant to Marsh, Allen Jenkins as a stage hand, and Ned Sparks in all his delightful gruffness, as a business partner.

The musical numbers are wonderful, with a Dubin-Warren score that features the title tune, You're Getting To Be a Habit With Me, Shuffle Off to Buffalo, and Young and Healthy, among others. The dance numbers are spectacular with Busby Berkeley at his most creative. But it is the accuracy of the dramatic narrative and the passion of the performers that truly defines "42nd Street" as a classic of its kind.

Ruby Keeler is all fresh faced enthusiasm. Dick Powell wavers from settled smugness to enthusiastic showmanship. Una Merkel and Ginger Rogers are delightfully wise-cracking. Guy Kibbee is wealthy creepiness. George Brent is a wonderful cad. But it is Warner Baxter who anchors the entire film, pushing the cast beyond their endurance through hours of rehearsal with little rest.

There is no real narrative structure,; mostly a series of connected vignettes, but the central story is about Abner financing Dorothy who is using him while maintaining a romance with Pat Denning who is describe as "her former partner in vaudeville, and now that she's made it big, he hangs around." Of course the producers have to do something about Denning, because if Abner Dillon finds out he is being two-timed, he will pull his financing out of the show. This all falls apart when Dorothy is injured and can't go on.

Of course the melodramatics of Marsh telling Peggy she is taking over for the injured Dorothy is the stuff of movie legend. When Warner Baxter tells Ruby Keller, " Sawyer, you're going out a youngster but you've got to come back a star," one can't help but be exhilarated. At the end, when Marsh leans against the building outside the theater and hears the audience filing out and talking favorably about the show, then practically collapses onto the back staircase, realizing he accomplished his one last hit, it is one of cinema's most emotionally powerful endings.

The risqué pre-code dialog is abounding. When a choreographer starts to help pretty Ruby Keeler with a dance number, he tells the pianist, "I'm just trying to make her..." whereupon the accompanist retorts, "yeah that's exactly what you're trying to do. At one point a chorus boy says to a girl on his lap, "Hey! Where ya sittin'? Where ya sittin'?" The girl replies, "On a flagpole, dearie. On a flagpole."

Some of what happens in "42nd Street" might seem cliché, but it was all new and different then. This is the film that came up with ideas that later became standards.

"42nd Street" received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Sound Recording, and was named one of the 10 Best Films of 1933 by Film Daily. Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times called the film "invariably entertaining" and, "The liveliest and one of the most tuneful screen musical comedies that has come out of Hollywood." The New York World-Telegram described it as "A sprightly entertainment, combining, as it did, a plausible enough story of back-stage life, some excellent musical numbers and dance routines and a cast of players that are considerably above the average found in screen musicals." "Every element is professional and convincing", wrote Variety. "It'll socko the screen musical fans with the same degree that Metro's pioneering screen musicals did."

If "42nd Street" isn't the greatest musical film ever produced, it is one of the top two or three.